


Untitled

by tessercat (nekonexus)



Category: Iron Man (Movies)
Genre: Gen, mcuflashmeme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 14:37:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5669566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nekonexus/pseuds/tessercat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A New Beginning, from a different angle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Untitled

**Author's Note:**

> Flashfic for mcuflashmeme Week 1.

Sunrise. Sunset. Sunrise. These are the borderlines, the light of a sun and the dark of its absence acknowledged by photoreceptors that delineate the passing of time.

But not in a cave.

In a cave it is: grey, shadowed, dusty, dim. Time is a lie. Time doesn't pass; the hourglass is shattered on the sandstone and those fine grains of sand block every pore, they get in your eyes and your eyes have no receptors for this irritant.

Don't weep. No amount of tears will restore your vision here.

Here the light is fake. Too much sodium-vapor casting everything in shades of orangey-red. The light is fake, but then he's a fake, too, so maybe this is fitting, that he should dwell in shades of hellfire that never burn to the clear bright white of a sun.

A good man saved him.

A good man lied to him, to save him, but he doesn't know that yet, because he doesn't understand good people. He has surrounded himself with people like him; liars, fakes, sodium-lit fireflies that burnt out in the dark of hotel rooms and casinos and...

And anyway, he can't read the lines on the good man's face. Can't see - no fault of the photoreceptors; only of the brain that interprets them - pain outside his own. Not here in the non-day/non-night of the cave.

When he stumbles, reborn inside a shell that does not protect everything he needs it to, he stumbles in the daylight. Here in the spaces where light reaches but indirectly, he finally learns the lie.

He sees the light and, oh god to whom he does not pray, it burns. His eyes are opened and he is blinded. Photoreceptors short-circuit and overload and he walks out into the world -- he flies out into the world -- only to crash and burn.

Life burns. Truth burns. And the sand is still spilled everywhere; he can't put it back in the hourglass.

Is it any wonder he wears shades?


End file.
